The Basic Level of Analysis

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Psychologists have been using different levels of analysis and not realizing it, or never making it explicit. They say the reason that these two camps have been fighting with each other for the last 20-30 years is that they've been actually using different levels to explain what's going on. The eye doesn't make any sense here. There's nobody's talking about, like, the intentional sense. Finally, the last one is just the physical stands there. You're actually talking about the physical stanti instantiation nuron, the nurons, the networks of neurons,. o the molecules that make up the nuron, chemical processes that are firing in the brain.

David and Tamler talk about the often rancorous debate among cognitive scientists and evolutionary psychologists over whether the mind is modular -- composed of discrete systems responsible for vision, reasoning, cheater detection, sexual jealousy, and so on. David and Tamler (mostly David) describe the history of the debate, then dive into a recent paper (Pietraszewski & Wertz, 2021) arguing that virtually all the disagreement is the product of a conceptual and methodological confusion â€“ that the two sides are operating with different levels of analysis and talking past each other as a result.

Plus, we REALLY tried not to talk about the University of Austin thing for the whole opening segment. We had another topic lined up and everything. It just didnâ€™t work out. Cicero would understand. Bari Weiss stans might wanna skip to the main segment.